Participatory Media for Education: Driving Student-Centered Learning

Abstract

With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, participation and collaboration have become predominant experiences on the Web. The teaching and learning community, as a whole, has been late to capitalize on these technologies in the classroom. How can we support pedagogical change with web-based course management systems and participatory media? Our research will attempt to answer this question through observation and analysis of faculty and student use of the tools in the course context, interviews with faculty and instructional support designers and a comprehensive research review. This poster reports some preliminary findings from a pilot study using the Social Media Classroom (SMC, 2009), a lightweight, open course site solution with embedded social media tools such as wikis, blogs, forums, chatrooms and social bookmarking, and will outline the following components: (1) Use of the Social Media Classroom in three I School courses, (2) Student/Instructor usage patterns, expectations, evaluations and best practices across courses, (3) Top-rated features we built to make the SMC more robust, which have since been released to the open community and (4) Implications for future research.